VOIR: a volumetric image reconstruction algorithm based on Fourier techniques for inversion of the 3-D Radon transform

A novel volumetric image reconstruction algorithm known as VOIR is presented for inversion of the 3-D Radon transform or its radial derivative. The algorithm is a direct implementation of the projection slice theorem for plane integrals. It generalizes one of the most successful methods in 2-D Fourier image reconstruction involving concentric-square rasters to 3-D; in VOIR, the spectral data, which is calculated by fast Fourier techniques, lie on concentric cubes and are interpolated by a bilinear method on the sides of these concentric cubes. The algorithm has great computational advantages over filtered-backprojection algorithms; for images of side dimension N, the numerical complexity of VOIR is O(N/sup 3/ log N) instead of O(N/sup 4/) for backprojection techniques. An evaluation of the image processing performance is reported by comparison of reconstructed images from simulated cone-beam scans of a contrast and resolution test object. The image processing performance is also characterized by an analysis of the edge response from the reconstructed images.